Fleisher found guilty of criminal mischief

The chairman of the Newport Water
Authority was found guilty of criminal mischief, July 14, in a hearing
before District Judge Donald Howell, for putting his personal trash in
someone else’s private Dumpster.

Luther C. Fleisher, 61, of the 200 block
of North Fourth Street in Newport was charged June 16 with one count of
summary criminal mischief, according to court documents.

The Dumpster belongs to the Newport Owls
Club on Penn Avenue and is used for club-generated trash. There are 810
members of the Owls. “If everyone put trash into our small Dumpster, it
(would be) stacked on Penn Avenue,” said Owl president Richard Scott
Maxwell.

He said club officials first noticed in
February that someone had been putting private trash in the Dumpster. So
they installed a camera, but the lighting wasn’t sufficient to get
images.

A week after the camera was installed, they found medication containers with Fleisher’s name on them in a bag of private trash.

Fleisher didn’t deny putting the trash
there, but said he did it only once. He had been to his camp for a
couple of days and when he got home he went to the Owls. “I looked at
the Dumpster and the bag of trash in my pickup truck, and thought better
there than on the street.” Besides, he said, he belongs to the Owls
Club. “I do help pay to take away the garbage.”

Howell fined Fleisher $100, less than the
normal $300, because there was only a small amount of trash put into
evidence. Fleisher has to pay an additional $129 in costs.

Investigating officer Richard Behne
reminded Fleisher that most of these kinds of cases are charged as theft
of services, a more serious grading than criminal mischief.

It’s a problem at many private Dumpsters,
Behne said. The one at the borough building/police station was being
misused until it was locked.

After the hearing, Fleisher said the whole thing was a vendetta by former water authority employees who had been fired.